It All Comes Down to This

{A picture of my perfect exposed-brick kitchen, minus the red Kitchen Aid Artisan mixer}

I only think to blog when I run out of all other healthy options for procrastinating. Actually, I don't have anything due for the next couple of days, and sans thesis, I find myself with a surprising amount of free time. So while cookies bake in the background, I'll fill any non-existent readers with the high- and low-lights of my all-too unexciting life.

Let me begin by re-emphasizing my love for this time of year. I think that there must be something in the autumn air that gives me hope for the bleak winter ahead. I love fall. I love crunchy leaves and the smell of rotting summer foliage as it returns to fertilize the earth. I love the way inside and outside temperatures vary, so that you feel comforted by coming indoors and refreshed when you go outside. I love the holiday season. There's no need to explain it, other than saying that I feel so alive right now.

In my (other) spare time, I plan for an imaginary future. I apartment hunt for that perfect 2-bedroom walkup in lower Harlem, where I will spend the next two years of my life. I might be chancing fate, considering that I don't know if I'll actually get the job in New York City, but it's just too much fun to pretend that I can plan my life so perfectly. This imagined future is the only thing I know for sure, as paradoxical as that may be. Other than the present and the ideal, I don't know where my life is headed. I live in the moment, but I cannot understand my actions any more than I can predict the future.

Oh, and one last thing: I graduate in 4.5 weeks. Yes, four point five weeks until my life belongs to me again. I am ready to bid the bureaucratic university adieu and resume the reading that has sat on my shelf for far too long. Maybe I'll even find a new hobby, like glass blowing, to fill the extraordinary amount of leisure time I will have. Again, another ideal that we both know won't be filled by any major productivity. Oh well.

Have a good one. I must tend to my baked goods.